'Suicidal' pilot may have killed 104 on crash jet

Experts have found no mechanical reason why a new Boeing 737-300 owned by SilkAir, a subsidiary of Singapore Airlines, plunged from nearly 35,000ft to the Indonesian island of Sumatra last December 19.

The lack of physical evidence has focused attention on the pilot, Captain Tsu Way Ming, a 41-year-old Singaporean. The chief investigator, Oetarjo Diran, told a press conference in Singapore yesterday that Tsu had been withdrawn from an instructor's programme and had a history of disagreements with his co-pilot on the doomed flight, Duncan Ward, 23, a New Zealander.

Mr Diran, an Indonesian, also revealed that two devices which would have yielded clues to the cause of the tragedy had mysteriously fallen silent before the jet went into its steep dive.

The flight data recorder stopped recording "several minutes" before the plunge and the cockpit voice recorder had stopped five to seven minutes before that. Two possible explanations could be a freak systems failure that eventually brought down the plane, or that someone in the cockpit had turned off the recorders deliberately.

Boeing conducted a failure analysis, but found no scenario in which the two recorders might stop sequentially on their own. After the voice recorder stopped, but before the data recorder halted, Mr Ward, the co-pilot, had chatted routinely with air traffic control, giving no hint of trouble. That all but discounts initial concerns of a bomb on board.

Mr Diran reported that no argument was heard in the cockpit before the voice recorder stopped. He said: "We haven't ruled out anything. We've just started the investigation, but that doesn't mean we have said suicide. I think we cannot discount anything right now, not even foul play."

Another investigator, Greg Feith from the US National Transportation Safety Board, said that pilot suicide was "one of many things" now under consideration.

Before joining the airline six years ago, Tsu was a member of the Singapore Air Force aerobatic team, the Black Knights, according to the Wall Street Journal yesterday.

The newspaper said Tsu quickly moved up from co-pilot to captain and last year was promoted again to the training job. SilkAir removed him as an instructor and returned him to the status of captain several months ago.

At the time, airline officials cited an incident in which a co-pilot had complained that Tsu failed to conduct himself properly during a landing in Indonesia. Tsu allegedly did not follow procedures for reporting the incident and subsequently argued about the matter with the same co-pilot.

There were informal complaints by other pilots that Tsu was a "cowboy" who did not follow the rules, the report said. Disgruntled over his demotion, Tsu appealed but was turned down.

An unidentified air safety expert familiar with the SilkAir investigation told the Journal it looked as if there had been a number of deliberate acts by a crew member preceding the crash. There are 3000 737s in use, making it the most popular jetliner in history.

Cockpit suicides are extremely rare, although an Air Morocco jet may have been steered into the ground by the captain four years ago, and a Japan Airlines captain deliberately pushed down the nose of his DC8 in 1982 while approaching Tokyo airport, killing 24.

Published in the Times, London. March 11, 1998